What I've Learned About Love Letters
DO LOVE LETTERS EVEN WORK? ITS THE IMPOSSIBLE QUESTION… THAT I HAD TO ASK.
Part of the goal of any episode of Was Is Could Be is to determine what — if anything — we might learn from looking back on a piece of our history. Not the big battles we might have turned or the outcome of a disaster we might have prevented, but the way we live — the things we do every day of our lives that make us people. Why did we stop doing those things? Should we have? Should we still do them today?
For the episode on love letters specifically, I couldn’t help but asking an impossible question — do love letters even work? Do they actually give/get us love? How can we decide if they’re good for us, if we can’t quantify their love-specific outcomes?
To quote interviewee Jan Swafford “you begin to see the impossibility in the letter itself”. Although, I’d fix the quote for my own needs and say “you begin to see the impossibility in the question itself.”
Fact is — you can’t quantify love. You can’t even really measure a relationship as successful – at least not as an outsider, looking back in on a marriage 200 years later. So what CAN we learn from these letters?
If I’ve learned anything very tangible about love letters, it’s that “love letter” itself is actually really hard to define. When we’re talking about a “love letter,” we’re automatically stepping into some assumptions about what constitutes a love letter in the first place. Bill Shapiro’s Other People’s Love Letters: 150 Love Letters You Were Never Meant to See clearly paints with a broad brush. A post-it note, an email, a napkin, even some drawings — all make the cut into Bill’s book, which shows many unconventional ways that we share love. They aren’t necessary post-stamped, dated, folded-into-an-envelope papers, but they all communicate. They all say something.
But even older letters — legitimate, post-marked and mailed — were categorized as “love letters” rather arbitrarily. The reality is — I don’t think Beethoven was like “instead of a letter, I’ll write a LOVE letter. That should do it!” They’ve been called “love” based on the feelings they emote in others, reading years later — perhaps even creating a context and story around the letter that was less obvious during the writer’s time. To be clear, in my research, I couldn’t really say for sure how many “love letters” I read, and how many I missed. If I went true research statistician on you — I can only say for certain that I read only one itty bitty percentage of the letters ever written — and someone else had already labeled them all love letters by then. After all, that’s how I found the letters in the first place — by searching for letters referred to or considered to be “love letters.”
I can’t tell you exactly what is and isn’t a love letter. What I can say is that love really hasn’t changed much at all. It’s messy. It’s complicated. It ends. Sure, we don’t see the same kind of raw, volatile swing of feelings play out in public during the 1800s the same was we see it all play out on Facebook today. But we do know from our history books that neither Beethoven nor Napoleon end up with the woman that they write so passionately to in the long run. We don’t see the undoing, but we do see it undone.
And love, even in these preserved letters — this one-day space of time — is still really, really real. It’s highly variable and emotional. In the space of a single letter, Napoleon both tells Josephine how much he loves her and also admonishes her for not writing — you know, while they both had affairs and right before he leaves her for someone he can produce an heir with.
“MAYBE WE COULD ONLY LOVE EACH OTHER FROM A DISTANCE.”
Writing these feelings down doesn’t leave anyone immune from despair. If I’ve convinced you to start writing love letters by doing this episode, please don’t misunderstand this very important part. Napoleon left Josephine to secure his position — to marry into true royalty and produce an heir. Beethoven’s love life was so confusing that not only did he end up alone, but we can’t even be certain who did and did not love him. Lord Byron — well one look at his affair with the Lady Caroline Lamb tells you about one third of the drama in his life.
But the connections we can find when writing a loved one is very real. Even the saddest of love letters show an unquantifiable amount of emotion. In one letter in Shapiro’s book a writer says “maybe we could only love each other from a distance." If that’s not real feeling — a true showing of emotion — I’m not sure what is.
For more on love letters, Beethoven, and my love life check out…
Are Love Letters Dead? - Was Is Could Be, Season 1, Episode 1 - A look at Beethoven’s mysterious love letters, the purpose of letter writing, and why we should bring it back.
Beethoven Meets Big - A look at the role of Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved Letters in the Sex and the City movie, featuring podcast interviewee Jennifer Silvershein.
Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved Letters - What are these letters all about anyways? Check them out for yourself - translated and all.
Modern vs. 19th Century Love Letters - A comparison between modern love letters and love letters of the 19th century.
Love? From? - My own love letters in review. This is pretty embarrassing.